In your memory of this night, the door will be open and a strange white light will run through it, into the trailer from the street. The sheriff will be in silhouette: a dark shape cut into that flood. A halo. A wash. A river.
Your mother is standing now and the sheriff looks across to where you and Rick sit on the sofa. Maybe you’d better send the boys to their room for a minute, the sheriff says.
What’s the matter, Jimmy?
The sheriff does not answer and after a moment your mother says, You and Ricky go on back to your room.
You complain briefly, since the show has not yet ended, although you see now that Marlin Perkins is free of the snake and they are bagging it in a huge burlap sack, but there is something in the sheriff’s presence that is unnerving and so you rise and tell Rick to come on and the two of you wander back to the bedroom you share with your brother.
What’s that all about? Rick says.
I have no idea. You flop onto the mattress for a moment and then reach down to slide your box of comic books out from the gap under the bed.
That was awesome with the snake, Rick says.
Yeah it was.
Hoo man, that guy’s a lot stronger than he looks.
I thought it was gonna get him, you say. For a minute.
He looked pretty wore out.
You pull a comic from the box and as you do so a sound comes from the front of the trailer. A weird high keening. You look up at Rick and he at you. A chill passes through you, starting in your center and radiating out in all directions at once, like a ripple in a pool of still water.
You call out into the front of the trailer: Mom? The comic next to you on the bed is called Chamber of Darkness. An old man caught up under the arm of some creature. Maybe a werewolf. Something else. The sound again. For the briefest instant, it feels as if it has come from the comic book. That keening. A sob.
When you enter the kitchen you find your mother in the arms of the sheriff. You’ll be OK, he is saying softly. Then you see that your mother is weeping.
Mom? you say again.
Oh god, she says. Then, between sobs: You have to tell him, Jimmy. I can’t do it. You have to tell him. Her voice is high-pitched, strained, frightening, and she does not lift her head from the sheriff’s shoulder.
OK, the sheriff says. I can do that. Let’s sit you down.
He steers her away from you, toward the sofa, and tilts her into it as if she would have been unable to sit on her own. You have no memory of your mother ever sitting on the sofa so the image of her there is incongruous. The recliner is empty. You almost tell the sheriff that the sofa is not her place but he has turned to you, and to Rick, and stands there for a long moment, looking at you both before he reaches out and lays a broad, heavy hand on your shoulder.
Listen, Nathaniel, he says. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Do you know that?
What happened? The sheriff’s face is liquid. Already you know that whatever it is, it will be terrible.
The sheriff clears his throat. So something really bad happened tonight, and you’re gonna have to be strong for your mom. You hear me?
You nod. Tears streak your face.
Your brother, Bill … well, look, he was in a bad accident. And he didn’t make it.
Didn’t make what?
He died, Nathaniel. Bill’s dead.
The sheriff’s eyes are wet too and his face warps and wobbles through your own tears. Everything flowing. Everything coming to pieces.
You’re gonna have to be strong for your mom, the sheriff says.
Bill’s … ? you begin, but of course you cannot finish the statement.
I’m sorry, the sheriff says.
There is no ground beneath you. Everything is water sucking into dry sand. You are in a muddy pond and there is a snake around your body and it is pulling you under. You are in a muddy pond and there is no television crew to help pull you from its depths.
THEY WILL tell you later that he was drunk, coming back from a bonfire party out in the mountains by the gravel pits, and simply slid off the road, the truck’s velocity well over seventy miles per hour. When the sheriff leaves your trailer, your mother disappears into her bedroom. You think she will return but she does not and you sit on the sofa in the silent trailer and think about the new knowledge that you have no brother, that you will never see your brother again.
Three days later you stand on the cut lawn at the funeral in the shiny black shoes you have borrowed from a neighbor, the toes of which, even in your memory, are covered in thin bright blades of wet grass. You cannot imagine that your brother is in that box, is going under the ground, even though at fifteen you are certainly old enough to understand. Your mother weeps with drunken abandon. You look at her momentarily, then back to the casket. You try to speak but no words will come and the tears that fall are frantic and endless. The feeling of liquidity has not ceased, as if all that dead sea has risen around you and you stand on the rough sand of its lowest depths.
Afterward you and Rick crouch in the dirt, huddling in the shadow of the trailer.
Shit, Rick says.
You look up at him and are surprised to see your friend’s eyes similarly wrapped in tears. He’s my brother, you say. What are you crying about?
I can miss him too, Rick says. He was your brother but he was still a friend of mine.
Get out of here, you say.
What?
Just get the hell out of here.